Renee+Cohen

I asked two of my daughters and my mother to complete the survey, in addition to myself. One daughter and my mother are both educators with masters degrees. The other daughter is an undergraduate student, and I am currently a graduate student, so there was not much diversity in my survey sample in that we are all female and all in education currently. Overall, the ages of survey respondents ranged from seven to 86, with 36 as the median age. It was also a very educated group of people who replied. More than half (53%) have completed graduate school or some graduate education, and an additional 20% have completed undergraduate degrees. With participants in the elementary school level, and more than 70% of all respondents having university level education, it can be assumed that everyone has had many more experiences with boring and fun classes than they listed. The less interaction between the instructor and students, the more boring the course seems to be. Many of the survey respondents, regardless of age, found it boring when instructors did not provide opportunities for discussion and/or other means of expressing individual opinions and contributing to the content in some meaningful way. It was also interesting to note the number of respondents that said their credential classes were boring. What are we teaching our teachers? Most survey respondents thought a learning experience was fun if they were able to have some hands-on participation. Also, costumes and role playing were felt to be fun, along with working as part of a team to accomplish some task. Additionally, several people recalled situations where humor was involved and that definitely made the experience more fun for the class. Music was mentioned several times as well, as adding to the fun factor. ** * Implications** for my own teaching and design work would include trying to make learning more fun by adding more interaction among students to the lessons. However, since my teaching is limited to adults learning a specific skill, this may be a bit challenging. I think that creating a game that will benefit those learning the skill of converting voice to text would be a great advantage to the profession. Currently, only ten percent of the people who enroll in court reporting school ever graduate and go on to work in the profession. Perhaps if there were a way to make the learning more fun, that number would increase. That would be a good thing, since the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts greater than average growth in the next ten years, due to ADA, FCC and other regulations that require captioning.
 * * Executive summary **
 * * What makes learning boring? **
 * * What makes learning fun? **